Quillfish

The Quillfish

The Quillfish looks just like a snake
But eats invertebrates.
Its body looks just like a straw
Puff's briny thirst to slake.

I didn’t promise a good poem every day, did I? Q is hard. I hope the image entertains! Sometimes, Midjourney seems to have an imagination almost as quirky as mine. Sometimes, I feed it my words and it goes, “Huh?” (The poem did not originally have a pufferfish in it at all. But MJ doesn’t seem to understand a fish that looks like a snake that could double as a straw, and balked. It created an interesting bestiary of fantasy creatures, but could not just give me one orange snake-like, straw-like quillfish.) That one, I could probably draw better, myself. But what it did give me made me laugh, so I’ll save my own drawings for Inktober2024!

Todays Poet

Nizar Qabbani

– Syrian Diplomat, poet, writer, publisher, lawyer, intellectual. Syria’s national poet. Read more here.

Nizar Qabbani’s poems

April is National Poetry Month. This year marks its 27th year. NaPoWriMo – 30 days of writing poems – is poets’ answer to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

This coincides with the A to Z Blogging Challenge, now celebrating its 13th anniversary. Some participants choose a theme; others wing it. Doesn’t matter! The real challenge is to build a practice of writing daily. I think I stuck with it…once. You can see the list of participants – I’m sure they’d love it if you’d visit and comment on their blogs.

This month, my goal is to:

1. Write a poem a day and share it – uncurated – here; and
2. Highlight some poets you may be unfamiliar with.

I encourage you to click the links to read about them and their work. I plan to choose a diverse array of classical and contemporary poets – indigenous poets, Black poets, women poets, LGBTQ poets – that challenge us to see the world differently while also tapping into universal themes and emotions.

Remember, too, that comments and conversation are always welcome here. (Spammers, on the other hand, will be tossed into the moat or mocked, so before you leave an irrelevant comment or drop a link, consider that it’s fair game!)